The Young Turks at a century

The Ottoman Empire had already been in retreat for over a century when the Young Turk revolution broke out in July 1908.
Some of the Young Turks hoped to save the whole empire; others wanted to abandon the empire and rescue an independent Turkey from the wreckage. The latter group won the argument, in the end, and although the rest of the empire fell under European imperial rule, 10 years later, Turkey itself was saved.
Now, 100 years after the Young Turks, the country is plunged into another constitutional crisis.
In March, the public prosecutor brought a case to Turkey's highest judicial body, the constitutional court, demanding that the ruling AK (Justice and Development) Party, re-elected only last year with an increased majority, be shut down for trying to subvert the secular state.
He also wants Prime Minister Tayyib Recep Erdogan and 70 other senior AK party members banned from politics for five years.
Earlier this month, the government struck back, arresting two retired generals and 23 other people on the charge of "provoking armed rebellion against the government." One, General Hursit Tolon, was the former second-in-command of the army.
Police allege that they were members of a state-backed gang that is suspected of a number of murders of prominent public figures with the aim of destabilizing Turkish society and forcing military intervention.
But wait a minute. "State-backed?" Isn't the government itself the embodiment of the state?
In Turkey, not necessarily. The conspirators, it is claimed, belong to what Turks call the "deep state," the alliance of senior judicial and military figures who still see themselves as the guardians of the secular Turkish republic that was ultimate result of the Young Turk revolution.
What the rebellious Young Turk officers demanded in July 1908 was the restoration of the constitution that had been suspended 30 years before.
It brought a rough kind of democracy to the multinational empire, but the various ethnic nationalisms, Bulgarian, Kurdish, Greek, Arab, Armenian -- and, above all, Turkish -- were already too strong for a unified state to survive.
The Ottoman Empire went under at the end of the First World War, leaving a decimated Turkish population (only eight million in 1918) to fight for its independence against British, French, Italian and Greek invaders who sought to carve up Turkey between them.
The man who led that independence struggle, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founded the Turkish Republic in 1923, and he made it one of the most rigorously secular states in the world.
Ninety-nine per cent of Turkey's citizens are Muslims, but political parties are banned from appealing to religion.
Even religious symbols are seen as dangerous: women wearing "Islamic" head-scarves are not allowed inside state institutions, including universities.
Initially, this militant secularism was a tactic for wrenching a largely illiterate and deeply conservative peasantry out of its medieval ways and catapulting the country into the 20th century.
Turkey must never be weak again, and to be strong it must be "modern." But as the decades passed, the reformers turned into a self-selecting "republican" elite who justified their privileges by claiming they had a mission to defend the secular state.
A hundred years after the Young Turk revolution, the Turks are again at a crossroads.
It is quite possible that the court will decide to ban the AK Party later this year, just as it rejected the new law allowing women students to wear the head-scarf at university last month. Many senior judges are part of the "deep state." But it is not 1908: the outlook this time is a lot brighter.
It will turn out all right because the self-nominated defenders of secularism are transparently cynical in their attempts to manipulate popular opinion. And it will be all right because the AK Party leaders have clearly decided that it's not worth having a bloody political battle now, when it's obvious that they have already won the war.
If the court bans AK, they will all resign from power peacefully, in obedience to the law. Then those who are not banned from politics entirely for five years will reform the party under another name, and fight and win another election.
And bit by bit, the "deep state" will wither away.
Canadian commenter Gwynne Dyer is based in London, England.